VIOLENCE TAKES MANY FORMS
The media regularly depicts horrifying instances of violence against women. Violence can take many different forms, including stalker incidents, robberies on the street, envious ex-boyfriends or ex-husbands, or domestic violence involving individuals we care about. The fact is that we often search for the most wonderful, miraculous solution to the most terrible difficulties in the event that it “happens to us” because of the media and our ingrained view that we, as women, are the weaker sex and are not as “strong” as men. You have no possibility of winning with that mindset since it is reactive, too constricting, and reactive in itself!
Now, so before I upset any more of you, allow me to explain. Our behaviour is frequently influenced by how we perceive our personal safety. If anything has occurred, or if the likelihood of a violent altercation is increased as a result of where you go, what you do, and who you hang out with, we look for an extreme response. Because of this, we constantly ask ourselves and our Krav Maga instructors, “What do I do if a man grabs me by the..” types of questions!
CHANGING LIVES
Although Krav Maga training will undoubtedly teach you how to use technical answers to challenging situations, your ability to react and apply the techniques will be greatly influenced by a variety of unpredictable external elements that are beyond your control, such as:
- How quickly you could respond in comparison to the person seeking to harm you, your size and strength
- Your emotional state and capacity to regulate your fight-flight reaction
- The surroundings you are in, among other things.
- How you can adapt to the surroundings and situation occurring.
The goal of Krav Maga is to develop open skills, one for which the environment is variable and unpredictable during the action. Krav Maga is a principle-based system. The principles embrace a wide variety of techniques to which some are precisely defined, while others are not. As soon as you are able to recognise the general principles supporting a specific technique, you will improve your perception of those underlying principles as well as become aware of other techniques that are based on the same or similar principles.
In performing one technical exercise, bear in mind the principles behind it. Therefore, you actually improve your ability to perform several of the techniques. This contributes toward improving your “open skill” response in related subjects. This is of crucial importance because it develops your ability to perform successfully when facing variations of the attack, which will call for proper adjustment of the specific techniques that you were practicing. The ability to defend against these variations of the ‘basic’ attack simulates true-life situations, which are always somewhat different from those conditions that exist in a controlled training environment.
This is one of the great benefits of an integrated and fully comprehensive training system: the ability to self-regulate your decision-making process , to practice solving new problems as well as to understand how to deal with variations of known problems.
